Cultural Chernozem

To understand something about the place occupied by the Platonov festival on the country's cultural map, a short morning walk along the main street of Voronezh. The occupation of the Revolution Avenue by students of the Moscow GITIS and the St. Petersburg RGISI, in the morning excitedly exchanging impressions in local coffee houses and nasal performances storming in the evenings, is eloquent confirmation of the status of the festival as the All -Russian Center for Cultural Attraction. Arriving in Voronezh for the first time, you, of course, remember that the reputation of one of the most meaningful domestic forums was fixed for Platonovsky for quite some time, and prepare for, so to speak, a meeting with the beautiful - but a personal acquaintance with the beloved brainchild of the artistic director Mikhail Bychkov and the patron of the festival Alexei Gordeev still turned around the knockout.

The absolute majority of cultural initiatives carried out today in Russia can be divided into two categories: some have a large financial and/or administrative resource, not wealthy ideas, and others are large ideas that are not provided with a resource for their implementation. Rare exceptions from this sad rule can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and Platonovsky-from such examples of a brilliantly invented and perfectionist, embodied project of national significance: a detailed study of the phenomenon of the Voronezh festival in a good way should make a mandatory point of the educational program of universities that prepare managers in the field of culture.

Investing in the Platonov festival, Governor Alexei Gordeev makes a very promising investment.

Platonovsky really has something to learn.

The first thing you pay attention to is the typology of the city festival unique for Russia, focused on the most wide coverage of the audience and addressed simultaneously to a variety of age and social groups (the public in Voronezh Kholyut and cherishes in the literal sense from the diapers - not without reason for the youngest here is the festival of the Marshak children's theater). Relations with the viewer line up extremely democratically, but with unchanged respect - without flirting with the shirnarms of populist actions, but also not fencing off the wall of elitism. In practice, this means approximately the following: a concert of the chamber composition of Amsterdam with oncertgebouw With Wagner and Maler in the poster, it is adjacent to the jazz Openayer, and the extensive program of World Music - with a branded retrospective of Sergei Eisenstein. In the regional art museum-exhibitions of Soviet non-conformists and the personal exposition of Vladimir Dubosarsky, in the former printing house of the newspaper "Commune", where Andrei Platonov once worked, the fresh project AES + F " Inverso Mundus ” , on the official AFTERPARTY will play the“ largest simple number ”.

The multidirectional festival program is striking in its emphasized universalism and all -leature: there are no hierarchies, the polemic between the “high” and “low” has been canceled, barriers between genres and arts are eliminated - it is necessary to say that such an artistic strategy is best consistent with the structure of today's society and the state of things in contemporary art. Platonovsky, passing at all conceivable and inconceivable sites of Voronezh, solves the most important task of consolidating the cultural space, uniting key city institutions into a single active network, parts of which are able to feed each other, exchanging a public and restoring the destroyed social ties - investing in the Platonov festival, the laureate of the special prize of the Golden Mask Governor Alexei Gordeev makes a very promising investment.

For all his pragmatics, Platonovsky is distinguished by some kind of degree of humanism rare for our latitudes. Humanity here is literally spilled in the air, each time manifested in a different way and in the most unpredictable way-in the well-thought-out logistics of free festival transport, which delivers the public to remote locations, in the sincere interest of volunteers, in the soft, friendly intonation, with which the young caretaker of the exhibition Alexander Shishkina-Khokusai suddenly relieves tension from the meeting with "praise practitioners" not very sophisticated in Contemporary ART spectators. The city of this attitude is gratefully responding - and, judging even by a cursory gaze, vibrates in time with the festival, lives it.

The most difficult thing at such a scale and the complexity of the poster is not to lose intelligibility in the device of its individual blocks. Judging by the theater segment of the program, Platonovsky also succeeded. The frankly populist-prostrate positions such as “white on white” wholesale merchant with cheap sentimentality Daniele Finzi Pski not only are balanced, say, “Chevengur” Yuri Pogrebniko, and they also exist on their own, but are built into the context of an important software vector, which is directed to new forms of the physical, visual theater and the “New circus ". Here, orientation is fundamental not only on the theaters that have already been in Russia, which has already been playing in Moscow, 111 - before landing in Voronezh, the crazy beauty of the “plexus” Orel, Bori traveled all the key European sites, from the London Sadler ' S Wells to the Lausanne Vidy , but also to open the names new for the Russian festival market: in the Russian festival market. This year with the performance "Perfect Garden" on Platonovsky was debuted by the owners of the "Golden Leo" of the Venice Theater Biennale - the Austrian group Liquid Loft .

The central event of the sixth Platonovsky account predictably was the three shows of Robert Wilson, released in Romanian Kraiov and continued the cycle of performances created by the great American director for the priests of the derivations, from “Lafontaine fables” in Comé Die-Fran çaise to Pushkin’s fairy tales in the theater nations. The “rhinos” became a kind of one and a half hour session of theatrical hemodialysis-meditation on how the rhythm of the performance is polyphonically sophisticated, how the geometry of its shape is perfect, how the drama of the light, musical and spatial scores are thinly built. The “rhinos” are composed not of a radical avant -garde, but a classic swore allegiance to the coordinate system, which puts at the forefront of the criteria for making, skill and professionalism. For the lost landmarks of the Russian theater, therapeutic meetings with Wilson's art are most important today - especially if they do not occur in the capitals, but in the regions.